Invalid email addresses and you

Dark0ne · May 2, 2018

We've made a small change to the site today to inform any users whose emails are "bouncing" that they need to update their email records.

A bounced email is basically an email we've sent you and then received back saying that the email is undeliverable.

Bounced emails are bad for us as they are expensive to deal with on our email delivery platform and ultimately, if you are using the wrong email address or an email address that does not work/exist any more then you will never be able to recover your account information if you lose it. Nor will I, as the only way I can verify you are who you say you are is through the email address attached to your account. Something I, for some reason, get blamed for regularly in the site Support tickets.

To clarify, we do not use your email addresses (or any of your personal data) for marketing purposes, nor do we, under any circumstances, sell your email addresses to third parties. Any emails we've sent in the past 7 years have been automated emails that you will have specifically asked to receive for things like forum notifications when something in a thread you are following has changed. You can turn these off at any time in your notification settings area on the forums.

On that note, our records show that more than 50% of you, some 7.8m members, have left the "Send me news and information" checkbox ticked when registering an account, which means that we could send you marketing emails or newsletters if we ever did them. In the interest of complete transparency, you can also turn this setting off in your notification settings area if you so wish.

In the 16+ years this site has been running I have only ever sent out 6 bulk emails, the last of which was in 2011 to send invites to the mod author group to some 5,000 users at the time. It is likely I'll use it again to contact mod authors about our impending Donation Points system, so, if you don't want to receive an email once in a very long time from us, you know what you need to do (if you haven't already!).

If you have received this email update notification on the site (which shows as an orange section at the top of every page) please re-verify your email address using the form provided in the section and it will go away. It will not go away until you do this, however, and at some point down the line, we will actually block access to your account until you provide a working email address again. As I said, bounced emails cost us time and money which we'd rather not have to worry about.

Thanks for your understanding.

seanxx · May 2, 2018

As always more than fair. Have we had a 2018 State of the Union yet? I love them

opusGlass · May 2, 2018

I probably should have filed a bug report a long time ago, but my notification settings keep changing themselves. I always disable the email option and use the in-site notifications for everything, but then I'll get an email and check my preferences and some of them have switched to email.